The OppLab Blog

What if everything you thought you knew was wrong? Would you open your mind and experience to new possibilities? Or hang on to your old ways of thinking? These questions came up for me when I started listening to the Invisibilia podcast, which has changed the way I think about the world in some very profound and important ways.

For example, having been trained as a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and psychiatric social worker, I—along with most Americans—have come to believe that personality is fixed. We’ve learned in school that by the age of 5 our personality is fairly well formed and by our early 20’s is shaped to be the person we are for the rest of our lives. Of course, we grow and we change, but when people think of a friend or a spouse or a family member’s personality, they tend to think that it’s fixed and stable.

We’ve also come to believe that our brains are hard-wired for certain basic emotions—like fear, anger, and sadness--and that there are fingerprints for these emotions, such as the way that our neural circuitry is triggered, our Galvanic skin response, and the nonverbal communication on our face. When something happens to us that triggers one of these emotions (for example, when we see a person who seems threatening coming towards us) there’s an automatic fear response.

If you listen to Invisibilia, and some of the episodes that I’ll recommend in a minute, you might change your mind about these long held beliefs that shape much of the way we think about ourselves and our lives. For example, psychology professor Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett tells us, in the Emotions episode, that variety is the norm in human emotions and expression. For every emotion that we might consider basic and universal in American culture, there exists at least one other culture that doesn’t possess a concept for that emotion or feel it at all.

Emotions aren’t universal, or hard-wired, at all.

This goes against everything I learned in my psychoanalytic training. And, it can be uncomfortable to have your perspective challenged and disrupted in such a profound way. Looking through our personal lenses, we see the world in a way that makes sense to us. And dislodging that can be stressful, or downright scary. But take it from me, seeing something with a new lens can open your mind to seeing more than you thought was there, creating even more possibilities.

For example, you’ve probably heard of the famous marshmallow test, which shows how well a child is able to delay gratification, and how that ability can predict a child’s success in life: how well they do in school, what kind of job they get, and how successful and happy they are in the rest of their life. When I listened to The Personality Myth episode, I was shocked to find out that Walter Mischel, the psychologist who first originated the marshmallow test experiment, actually concluded largely the opposite of what we regard as the test’s implications.

Many psychologists and others have used the marshmallow test to prove that personality is shaped early and certain traits, like the ability to delay gratification, are fixed and stable. Mischel argues virtually the opposite here. (The episode first aired in 2016, and Mischel subsequently passed away in September 2018.) He pointed out that the instructions he gave to different sets of children significantly affected the outcome. In other words, the context in which they took the test determined the results.

What Mischel tells us, that you didn’t know about the study, is he contrasted the results by giving different sets of instructions to the same children. For example, when Mischel told a child staring at a marshmallow that, if they could resist the temptation to eat it for 15 minutes, they’d be rewarded with a second one, many children couldn’t wait. But the same child who couldn’t wait, when told to make believe it was imaginary, suddenly was able to delay their gratification. The context was much more important than who the children were; it affected how they behaved.

Mischel says that what we think of as fixed over time, our personality, only seems fixed because our situation in life is fixed. If you live in a developed country that is stable and democratic, your parents and your family are stable over time, and your overall situation remains more or less the same, than your personality may seem to be fixed. However, if your situation changes radically—you’re forced to move to another country, or some tragedy happens that disrupts your circumstances significantly—Mischel argues that your personality may not be as fixed as you think and different traits may arise.​So this is as far as I’ll go to make the case for Invisibilia and why you might want to think differently about yourself and the world. Check out some episodes and try it for yourself. In addition to The Personality Myth, I recommend you listen to Emotions and the follow-up episode, High Voltage. The Culture Inside, Frame of Reference, and Flip the Script are my favorites.